Essay in THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2018;
(cited in BAE 2015, 2016, 2020); PUSHCART poetry finalist
By William Torphy
Forty-seven percent (that’s 47%) of Americans do not have $400. in cash available for an unexpected emergency. This is a statistic that has stuck with me for a very long time, one that reveals most directly a dysfunctional economy, and now with the Covid-19 crisis places at least half of all Americans in deep financial… Read more »
By Lori Michas
Living mere blocks from the university where I work, it is easy to see the vast generational divide in how we view and are experiencing the COVID-19 virus pandemic. Online, a colleague made a post to Facebook pleading with others to join in calling Idaho Governor Brad Little’s office to urge for more stringent social… Read more »
By Robbie Gamble
I’m a nurse practitioner and I’ve been working at Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program for twenty years. Yesterday, March 25th, I was called in to work at our main facility, on a floor where one wing is hastily being transformed into a COVID-19 unit, where we can receive homeless folks who have been… Read more »
By Herman Axelrod
To think about the implications and permutations of the coronavirus is a daunting affair with no clear-cut solution. The thought of being volitionally incarcerated in one’s home would have been inconceivable a few short months ago. Perhaps a few short weeks or even days ago. The point is, according to most credible intelligence, commit to… Read more »
By Francis Annagu
Talking with DeBorah Gilbert White, founder of HerStory Ensemble: an American NGO, which supports the empowerment of women who’ve experienced homelessness, or are at the risk of homelessness. HerStory Ensemble promotes education, awareness, economic development, and advocacy to end homelessness. In this exclusive interview with DeBorah Gilbert White, we talked about critical issues on homelessness in America,… Read more »
By Aaron Wallace
America’s current obsession with veterans and supporting them has seeped into our daily routines since the initial invasion of Afghanistan almost twenty years ago. Eateries and oil change shops offer discounts; furniture stores back their commercials with rippling red, white, and blue graphics; and there is always a pro-military bumper sticker in the afternoon rush… Read more »
By Ruth Hoberman
“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hail souls out of men’s bodies?” Benedick asks as he listens to Balthasar sing and play his lute in Much Ado about Nothing. “There’s part of me, lying on a page,” I sometimes think reading a poem, feeling delight, wonder, and perhaps a touch of envy. “Why… Read more »
By Buff Whitman-Bradley
On the way to the demonstration to protest the big-business theft of water from indigenous peoples, I passed by a crowded bus stop and noticed in the clutch of waiting commuters a grimy, disheveled man carrying a magnificent russet and black rooster perched on his forearm, a bird of tremendous dignity and aplomb. A bus… Read more »
By Eileen O'Connor
Little Women is nominated for an Oscar for best picture and writer/director Greta Gerwig for best adapted screenplay. This recognition by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is well-deserved. But it is not enough. Gerwig deserves a nomination for best director. If Little Women wins the 2020 Oscar for best picture, the award… Read more »
By Marie Manilla
She was a big girl. Over six feet with enormous hands. She wore a skirt, silk blouse, and oversized pumps. Black hair framed her face like curtains. It was 1994, long before Caitlyn Jenner put a famous face on the puzzle my English class was trying to solve. The library was transitioning to a computerized… Read more »
By Jean Trounstine
“This hospital would be impossible for anyone with a normal brain to navigate,” Barbara says, eyes flashing anxiously. We stand arm in arm, staring at the colored squares and rectangles on the wall map that shows Building A connecting to Building C via hallways called B. I’ve never looked at a hospital floor plan before… Read more »
By Lee Hope
Interview with Martha Nichols, editor of Into Sanity, Interview by Lee Hope Editor-in-Chief, Solstice: Essays about Mental Health, Mental Illness, and Living In Between — A Talking Writing Anthology Could you describe how you see the “ancestral threads” of mental illness permeating many of these essays? Could you give a few examples? The image of… Read more »
By Jen Epervary
By Jen Epervary
By Cindy House
In 1983, when I was a sixteen-year-old sophomore in high school, two teenagers in my town hit a tree head on at a high rate of speed, resulting in their deaths. It was one o’clock in the morning on a Friday in early June. The sound shredded the sleep of the residents in the closest… Read more »
By Nelson Lowhim
In this post,author and veteran Nelson Lowhim reflects on PTSD and the discussions that happen, and don’t happen, between veterans and civilians. I recently went to a dramatic reading of the Sophocles play Ajax, hosted by Theater of War, a group that uses theater to explore PTSD, trauma, and other difficult topics. In the production,… Read more »
By William Crawford
Managing Editor’s Note: In this piece by William Crawford, his photo of a cemetery in a town devastated by contamination from mining triggers a touching essay about the birth and death of a town and the melancholy words of Tom Rush, a popular folk singer-songwriter from the 1970’s. The underlying poisoning of the town is a story… Read more »
By Rochelle Spencer
Note from Assistant Managing Editor, Anita Ballesteros: In this blog piece from Rochelle Spencer, she speaks with three women writers in the Bay Area, all women of color, about the role of art to create social and life-altering change. I love what Judy, Raina, and Melinda have to say in this amazing powerful piece, and… Read more »
By Patricia Carrillo
Note from Intern Anita Ballesteros: Patricia Carrillo Collard, in this week’s powerful blog post, snaps the reader to attention. Patricia challenges us all to look deeper within ourselves with her reflections on societal acceptance of violence against women and marginalization of women as a result of conscious — and subconscious — misogyny. MISOGYNIST — WHO,… Read more »
By Diane O'Neill
Note from Intern Anita Ballesteros: This week in our guest blog post, Diane O’Neill writes about her personal experience as a descendant of Irish immigrants, and her views on the social and political climate surrounding immigrants in America today. America is built on many nations, and her piece speaks to the current perceptions and the… Read more »
By Jane Shiau
Note from Intern Anita Ballesteros: In Jane Shiau’s guest blog post this week, she shares her personal humorous and uplifting account of finding a sense of belonging in America through Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon. This short piece resonates with the challenge of feeling welcome in today’s multicultural environment. A WRITER FINDS HOPE IN OLYMPIC… Read more »
By Anita Ballesteros
Last week, a young woman, 20 years old, a classmate of my son’s from kindergarten through graduation, was murdered. In the sleepy bedroom community that we live in, such news is always shocking. There is a bubble of safety, or the illusion of it, that surrounds us here. She was killed — no, not killed, violently slaughtered – by her boyfriend, in a wealthy, predominantly white suburb close to Boston.
By Donnie Welch
I run poetry workshops for students with developmental disabilities. Every week I meet with thirty-six students to work on the writing of original poetry. By and large, creative work and arts education is met with skepticism in neurodiverse education. It can be cute to do the occasional, holiday art project, but researchers can’t track data from it, school districts can’t quantify the results of it, and, as a result, schools can’t fund it.
By Robbie Gamble and Anita Ballesteros
Managing Editor’s Note: Today we feature poet, essayist, and social justice activist Robbie Gamble. Robbie considers the purpose and function of poetry in the context of this year’s solar eclipse and political upheaval, writing that poetry can help us “explore the emotional nuances we are experiencing at the edge of all the chaos.”
First, read an introduction by our new intern, Anita Ballesteros. Anita comes to Solstice Magazine from Lesley University’s MFA program, where she studies fiction writing. As you’ll see, Anita has led a fascinating life full of travel, diverse experiences, education, and motherhood. Welcome Anita!
By Danielle Legros Georges and Richard Hoffman
In recognition of Martin Luther King Day, we are sharing two pieces that reflect on our current socio-political landscape. Read Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges’ essay “American Without Prefix” and Solstice Magazine’s Nonfiction Editor Richard Hoffman’s poem STATE OF THE UNION.
By Chetan Tiwari and Sandell Morse
Today, in our continuing series on social justice issues, we feature two pieces that deal with protest and how it is talked about within a society. In “Focus,” Chetan Tiwari writes about Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee during the national anthem at NFL games, and how our discussions about this veer away from the topic of police brutality to patriotism and other “weapons of mass distraction.” In “A Cautionary Tale,” Sandell Morse shares her experience visiting Catalan during the National Strike, held to protest police brutality, Finding that civility prevails in the discussions she heard about this charged topic, Morse worries that the United States, with its current less-than-civilized approach to political discourse, may become “a cautionary tale” for the Catalonians
By Vanessa Lewis and Jen Minotti
The first two guest posts in our series addressing social justice. In the first, Jennifer Minotti confronts fellow parents after one of their children uses a racial slur against her daughter. In the second, Vanessa Lewis challenges the idea that to “take a knee” during the anthem at a football game is unpatriotic.
By Dzvinia Orlowsky
Elisabeth Schmeidel (1945-2012) was born in Austria. Her father Herrmann von Schmeidel, a conductor in Salzburg, and her mother, Eleonora von Arbesser Rastburg, named her after the writer Bettina von Arnim, but she was baptized Elisabeth, absent any saint named Bettina.
By Rachel Berg Scherer
I adored the process of having my first baby. I was so thankful to be pregnant, I loved labor, and I loved giving birth. It was overwhelmingly empowering and powerful and transformative. I would give birth every day for a month if it meant I didn’t have to live with a newborn again.
By Rochelle Spencer
“As African Americans, when we play, we play hard,” says Johnnie Davis, Director of Serenity House, a program that provides services for women who have been raped or molested, and experience homelessness, and/or mental health or emotional issues, tells me inside Serenity House’s ocean-colored walls.
By Marilyn McCabe
I took a class to learn how to meditate. It didn’t go well. At least I didn’t keep falling asleep, like one guy did. I was always thinking about food. (This kind of stuff seems to have that effect on me — I took a yoga class some years ago, and all I could think about was: Is this over soon so I can go have a beer? And I don’t even really drink beer.)
By Shilpi Suneja
Two days after Srinivas Kuchibhotlas was shot dead at a bar in Kansas, his wife Sunayana Dumala spoke at a press conference about her concern for staying on in America. “I often asked my husband,” she revealed, her voice breaking, “are we doing the right thing (by) staying.” Sunayana’s fears hint at the awkward moral burden immigrants from the Indian subcontinent place upon themselves.
By Jill Frances Johnson
Sorting through files in my parent’s office after they’d moved into assisted living, I found an old newspaper clipping–an editorial Mom had written. I paused at her bio: activist, teacher, homemaker. The description evoked a woman with defined lines, neat and contained.
By Lisa McKenzie
I was sitting with my husband outside an ice cream shop on the east side of Cincinnati, watching our son caper around a park with his buddies from Shakespeare Camp, when my husband observed, “I don’t feel white here.”
My husband is white. Half white. He is also half Chinese.
By Jessie L. Benjamin
Meditation creates the space, writing fills the void. I’m called to both.
For twenty years, my daily sitting meditation practice has nourished me. It’s essential, like oxygen keeping me sane and, hopefully, kinder and more compassionate.
By Kevin Holton
A book of poetry, more than a book in any other genre, has the unique power to switch from topic to topic, spanning continents and eons if the writer wishes, to capture a wide array of experiences. Skin Music, by Dennis Hinrichsen, does this well.
By Richard Cambridge
How to chart the landscape of desire? A pencil is a good start, a draft, a poem. But soon you’ll be dipping a pen in blood, your own blood, and the blood of your ancestors and your enemies. You’ll have crossed the border and entered the landscape. You’ll need something stronger than poems. You will need to make spells.
By Elaine Fletcher Chapman
The year my mother died, I claimed a desk for myself in the family room. I placed my notebook and the books that were my touchstones at the time on the desk. I bought a beautiful fountain pen from pennies saved, ink made from roses.
By Lyndsey Ellis
Like many people, I’m still in post-election recovery mode. I’m shocked, confused, angry, sad, numb, yet somehow relieved that one of the vilest presidential campaigns in U.S. history is finally over.
By Joyce Peseroff
Reviewer—Joyce Peseroff ASK ANYONE by Ruth Lepson, Pressed Wafer, 2016, 68pp., $12.50 Managing Editor’s Note: Some reviews of poetry collections are not only insightful, but a pleasure to read. Reviewing poetry is a challenging task, given the art form’s sometimes slippery use of language and the subjective quality of interpretation. Peseroff manages it beautifully.… Read more »
By Kathleen Aguero
he powerful grassroots movement, #BlackLivesMatter, is sometimes countered with the slogan “all lives matter.” Well, of course they do. That’s the point of #BlackLivesMatter—to demand we acknowledge the importance of lives, Black lives, too often treated as if they mattered not at all, with tragic results.
By Eileen O'Connor
Canadian author Kelly Oxford’s tweet from the evening of October 7 was brave. Her call to women, “tweet me your first assaults,” was significant. It was the right tweet at the right time. By the next evening, Oxford was receiving up to fifty responses per minute. Millions of stories have since been shared at #notokay, and many of these tweets represent the first time someone has shared her story. Many note that, like me, they kept quiet for so long because of shame. It took me fourteen years.
By Rebecca Hart Olander
Wendy Mnookin’s fifth collection, Dinner with Emerson, is organized according to the four seasons. It begins with spring and runs through the year, followed by a fifth section, “Another Spring,” that features poems in a season that stretch beyond “Winter.” There is a sense of the ongoing about these poems, that life marches on, that we learn to turn the page, and that despite whatever we are slogging through, there will be another season.
By J.A. Grier
You know a writer with mental illness, even if you don’t realize it or know that person by name. Maybe the writer is a friend, or someone in your critique group, or someone you met at a writer’s convention. Maybe it’s someone you are working with on a publication.
Or maybe that writer is you.
By Jennifer Jean
This past May, I drove Professor Gwendolyn Rosemond home after she attended one of the bi-annual artist retreats I co-direct with my husband—we traveled along scenic route 127, from Gloucester at the tip of Cape Ann in Massachusetts, to Salem which is further South, at the Northshore’s midpoint. We drove for about forty five minutes and in that span we solved both the adjunct problem and the diversity problem at universities. Well, we solved a key portion of these problems. “Grow your own!” Gwen said. And, she was absolutely right.
By Amy Grier
Hello! You have, for the first time, the tenth, or the hundredth, happened upon SolsticeLitBlog. We are the official blog of Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices. Welcome!
By Lee Hope
I was honored to interview the internationally known photographer, Lou Jones. Lou also quietly serves on many boards to further photography and mentors multiple young photographers. He is an artist who gives back, in his art and in his service.
By Amy Yelin
Bookfox, a literary blog run by John Matthew Fox, included Solstice in his annual list of Literary Non-Fiction Markets! Thanks for including us, John!
By Lee Hope
Solstice editor-in-chief, Lee Hope, was interviewed on The Jordan Rich Show about her novel, Horsefever. You can hear the full interview here. Also, Horsefever has been listed as the Small Press Distribution #2 fiction bestseller in Jan/Feb. Due out on March 16th, you can order Horsefever today at Amazon and Barnes & Noble! LIKE: https://www.facebook.com/Lee-Hope-507320366097313/ • MORE INFO: leehopeauthor.com
By Richard Hoffman
Due out on March 16th, you can order Horsefever today at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Like Lee Hope on Facebook. • MORE INFO: leehopeauthor.com Who Sinks? Who Rises Up Again? An Interview with Lee Hope (originally published at Fiction Writers Review) I have been an admirer of Lee Hope’s fiction for many years. Her widely published short stories are… Read more »
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